Brands Will Soon Be Able to Track Rewards on the Blockchain. Here’s How

In today’s noisy digital landscape, brands need to work harder than ever to keep the loyalty of their customers and users.

According to Loyalty360, the biggest drivers in consumer loyalty are customer experiences (29%), rewards (25%) and discounts (21%). Unfortunately, as our digital ecosystem has continued to scale at a rampant rate, the ways in which brands attract customers and ultimately keep them loyal have remained largely outdated. Providing customers with slight discounts for creating accounts on the brand’s platform might be enough to get them to sign up—but it’s far from enough to keep them coming back time and time again.

ReChain, a blockchain-based rewards platform, became aware of the issues that affect customer loyalty when they were looking for creative ways to reward their own users—ReChain’s parent company, Rowl, Inc., owns and operates platforms with a combined 11 million registered users. As they were looking for ways to reward and incentivize people already engaging with their platforms, the ReChain team realized there was a much bigger opportunity at play—and one blockchain technology was perfectly suited to solve.

“No one wants to manage dozens of different loyalty programs,” said ReChain CEO Gregory Butler. “People can hardly keep track of all their different user names and passwords, let alone keep track of how many points they’ve earned across a handful of different brands. With ReChain, we are creating a secure ecosystem for users and brands to connect, with each user utilizing a singular digital wallet.”

The idea for ReChain is timely, considering that the long-term value of a customer for a brand is one of their most valuable metrics. There are various ways to calculate how much a customer is worth to a brand, and this calculation can dictate whether your marketing strategy should be to increase order frequency or increase the average amount spent per order.

By leveraging the blockchain, ReChain will allow brands big and small to deploy loyalty programs that allow for more effective tracking, faster redemption (a huge pain point for customers) and more trustworthy relationships with consumers.

“We use the blockchain to create time-stamped, permanent, traceable records which help reduce fraud, double-spending, abuse and leakage,” said ReChain CTO Barbara Bickham. “The security is harder to hack, helping to reduce risk. These are some of the attributes that help build trust within the ReChain ecosystem.”

To bring these value offerings to the new loyalty economy, ReChain offers the following tools:

Sophisticated data collection and analysis for targeting campaigns

Unique opportunities to target potential customer profiles directly

Full-scale reporting and testing for branded campaigns to improve over time

The ability to more honestly and effectively engage current and potential customers

A rewards ecosystem that gives companies access to new audiences

In addition, advertisers will have the ability to reach highly targeted individuals who willingly provide their personal information in exchange for points and more relevant, intrusive ads.

When you consider the fact that 73% of all loyalty programs today are points based, it feels natural for the rewards space to move toward brands incentivizing users with a virtual currency for the right behaviors. Unfortunately, today’s points-based ecosystem is highly segmented. It forces users to manage dozens of different programs, and prohibits brands from working together to reach customers that share similar or tangential interests.

“We believe the rewards landscape needs more than just a universal currency,” said ReChain CPO Brian Moynihan. “It needs an ecosystem where brands, publishers and users are all working together to deliver the best results.”